Wintermute voice assistant makes intro at CES

January 10th, 2013 by Nancy Owano in Technology / Software

Credit: Nuance Communications

Credit: Nuance Communications

(Phys.org)—Nuance, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based company known for its speech technology, is talking up its Project codenamed Wintermute, and is demonstrating the project's cross-platform, cloud-based virtual assistant. Nuance said it is presenting its cross-device persona project Wintermute at Nuance's exhibit at the Consumer Electronics Show, to demonstrate "how mobile personal assistants follow you from one device the next, remembering what you like, what you've been doing, and where you've been. Listening to the game in your car? Your TV will know when you ask to simply "put on the game" just which one you mean."

Discussing the project in Las Vegas, Nuance showed how a cross-platform phone and other devices could work with each other as a total platform-agnostic system with the virtual assistant able to serve the user's questions and commands from one device the next, regardless of device type or operating system.

Wintermute can tie together data from multiple devices. The Wintermute aid at the CES show was put to work in a smartphone scenario where the smartphone was asked for a football game score, and then a voice command to a Dragon TV-enabled television was to "Put the game on," without any mention of the teams that were involved in the phone request.

The television began playing the same game, unprompted. The Wintermute demo showed the technology enabled an ability to take a query and understand across platforms.

Responses to the Wintermute project showing at CES were favorable to the very idea of being able to tap into a virtual personal assistant from any computer, handset, or tablet.

Nuance has clearly seen the role that mobile persona assistants play and believes in the company's potential to find success in a cloud-based system such as this. ("At Nuance, we're the people who make voice work," boasts the company, which is known for its Dragon speech recognition software, where the user talks and the computer types.) Nuance's Personal Mobile Assistant survey of 1,000 American consumers asked respondents what they were using their personal assistants for. The most common uses were for driving directions, 84 percent; the weather, 72 percent; and restaurant recommendations, 61 percent.

Nuance said survey results also showed that over 80 percent of people surveyed would want their mobile personal assistant to travel with them across all of their devices, including phones, tablets, PCs, cars, TVs, and cameras.